"He exclaimed with great relish"

The motivation: I recently moved to a new place and got a nice desk; a desk which I decided I'd like to keep free of as much clutter as possible. So besides finding places out of view to store my USB hub and external hard drives, that left... the mouse.

I had been using a Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 1000 (gdgt) for the past few years. I loved it; it was comfortable in the hand and made navigating my screens a breeze. But the cord hanging out the back seemed a little strange on the new desk, so I figured I'd find something wireless.

At first I assumed I'd just get a wireless Microsoft mouse; despite their track record in other fields, Microsoft seems to have nailed making a mouse that fits comfortably in your hand without having to put any thought into it. But I also wanted a mouse that used Bluetooth, so I didn't have an RF dongle to worry about carrying around. Though the Microsoft mouse I was looking at looked... fugly (gdgt). I wasn't crazy about the design, so I thought about getting a different make of mouse.

I'd been curious about the Magic Mouse after reading reviews from those who either loved or hated it. So I went ahead and got one to try out.

First of all, it took some getting used to. You can't hold it the "lazy" way you would grasp a Microsoft mouse. That is, you can't hold it by laying your wrist flat on the desk, with your palm resting on top. The Magic Mouse is pretty thin, and holding it that way would become uncomfortable pretty quickly. Rather, you have to operate it with your elbow resting on a surface so that your wrist can float above the desk and curve downwards. Not only does this give the best angle for holding the mouse, it also makes it easier for your fingers to trigger the touch controls.

I haven't gone crazy with the touch controls yet, and I plan to go over that in a future post (once I've been able to play with some third party tools that enable additional features for the Magic Mouse), but the basics of clicking are similar to the Mighty Mouse (and I've been playing with those third party tools to fine-tune the clicks just the way I like them). And the scrolling is pretty nifty; you can scroll through a large list in iTunes or a large page in Firefox in a snap.

Don't get me wrong... there were a few days when I was still getting used to the Magic Mouse when I would look over longingly at the box in which my old mouse now sat. But after about a week, using the Magic Mouse has become second nature, and it's definitely helped in clearing out the clutter on my desk. I'm not sure if it's magical, but it makes for a pretty good mouse.